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Educating the autonomous learner in a Confucian school: subjectivity, memorisation and dilemma

Research Output: Contribution to journal Article Peer-review

Abstract

The current literature on Chinese governmentality and subjectivity lacks rigorous discussion of the involvement of Confucian education. This article applies Foucauldian conceptual tools to explore this scholarship gap empirically. Based on ethnographic fieldwork at a Confucian school, we explore how Confucian pedagogical techniques are used to create a type of subject. This article first presents pedagogical reform in a Confucian school. The resultant pedagogy of individualised memorisation combines two paradoxical knowledge sources: the individualised teaching principle and the method of repetitive memorisation. We then demonstrate how the Confucian teaching techniques used in the classroom result in contradictory processes of subject-making. Students are governed by the technologies of power in the disciplined classroom but are also encouraged to be the "master" of their own study according to the technologies of the self, so as to become autonomous learners. The revived Confucian education is encountering a profound cultural dilemma between autonomy/individuality and coercion/authority in the making of subjects.

Publication Information

Output type

Research Output: Contribution to journal Article Peer-review

Original language

English

Pages from-to (Number of pages)

Pages 61-70 (10 pages)

Journal (Volume, Issue Number)

China Perspectives (Volume 2023, Issue 135)

Publication milestones

  • Published - 01/12/2023

Publication status

Published - 01/12/2023

ISSN

2070-3449

External Publication IDs

  • handle.net: 10547/626400
  • Scopus: 85189985559

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